His East London neighborhood of Hackney, where he’s been for 15+ years, and the evolution it’s gone through from dodgy to hipster haven; the divisiveness not only between London and the rest of the U.K., but also between generations, as in Steven and his father, with whom his values vastly diverge, who voted for Brexit and perceives London as intimidating and full of cultural elites, and ultimately wants the country to go back to the way it was; his productive time in the U.S. teaching film at SUNY Buffalo from 2004-07, after a 48-hour interview process (in the U.K. you’re in and out the door in 45 minutes, he said); his evolution as a teacher, which lead him to a Reader teaching post which allows him significant time to devote to his films; the complexities around distribution of art-based films – when and where to release and in what addition;

how his ongoing state in making films is to feel alien, how feels like a stranger to himself when he’s making them; his film Island, which will begin as a multi-channel art gallery installation before its release in late 2017/early ’18 as a feature film, and is about the end of life (literally); all of the complex logistics with legal as well as emotional contracts and the navigation of ethics that allowed him to be a first-hand witness on more than one occasion; how art has always had a relationship with death, but it’s been somewhat taboo dealing with it through film; and finally a story about a harrowing night on a Scottish isle that he and former guest Kysa Johnson shared.

What she likes to listen to in the studio (over and over) while she’s working on a body of paintings; her time in SF, where she started her art career, met her husband and had two kids before leaving for L.A. (where she’s been since August ’16); her switch from a PhD in neuroscience at UC Davis to art; her aversion to critical conversations about her work, which started in grad school and didn’t end until after she was showing; we have a long exchange about abstraction (mostly thanks to my taking so long to ask the question I wanted to ask), and she clearly articulates her objective- of getting her viewers to feel emotions, to be moved,when they see her work—and she uses the analogy of music, specifically Nina Simone, that she aspires to move her viewers the way Nina Simone’s music moves her; how her parents have been supportive of her as an artist in their own ways, such as her dad making a custom studio-sitting bench for her; her origin story of when she decided to become a mother, something she’s ‘always’ wanted to do, and why; she weighs in as a parent on those who aren’t parents, and (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) how she’d like to lord her superiority of being a parent over non-parents, for the time-being at least; and she explains how when she’s in the studio, the only thing she’s thinking about his her work—no exceptions.